jimhines

On Monday, I was called an antisemitic whore. Yesterday, I was told twice to go f*** myself. It’s turning into an eventful week, and I can’t wait to see what today brings.

I’ve written before about trying to apply Sanchin-Ryu (karate) to other areas of my life, particularly my writing. Some of my interactions this month have gotten me thinking about how those principles of self-defense might apply online.

Take yesterday as an example. Over on Twitter, I posted, “Dear white folks trying to defend, justify, or minimize the shooting of an unarmed black kid. Please just shut the hell up already.”

I knew perfectly well that this will piss some people off. (I’m amazed I haven’t yet been accused of censoring or hating free speech.) “Please shut the hell up” is an aggressive statement, and given the public nature of the internet and the number of people following me online, I know some will get angry and tell me to go f*** myself. The question is what I do next.

Walk away. It is really hard to walk away from someone being wrong on the internet. It’s hard to recognize that I have a choice about whether to give someone my time and energy. I’ve only got so much; why should I spend it on this clown?

There’s a part of me that wants to DEFEAT ALL THE OPPONENTS, but that’s just ego:

“Hines, you’re nothing but a punk, and I should kick your ass!”

“Avast, random internet person! You smell like goblin farts, and I shall pwn you like Éowyn pwned the Witch-king of Angmar!”¹

What’s the point? Is my ego so insecure that I can’t tolerate one person hating on me? If so, I probably ought to get out of the writing biz. Or am I worried my readers will see this person’s Frothing Tweets of Hines-Hate and say, “By the Flying Spaghetti Monster’s meaty balls, he’s right! Jim C. Hines is a punk with a highly kickable ass! I bite my thumbs at him, and shall never read his books again!”

If the only reason to engage is to soothe my injured ego, then I need to walk away. If I have so little faith in my friends and readers, then that’s my problem, one I have to work on.

But sometimes walking away doesn’t work. Sometimes people bring the fight to you, whether it’s a bully who follows you after school or a troll who comes to your site to attack you and others.

Everything begins with stance and breathing. If someone hits me, I can’t strike back effectively until I regain my balance. If I try, I’m going to end up flailing around like a Muppet gone wild.

In a real fight, I’ll have little time to take a breath, settle into a stance, and take control of the situation. I train so that this will become automatic. Online, I usually have more time to regain my balance. The trick — the thing I always struggle with — is remembering to take that time, to just breathe and get past the initial HULK SMASH adrenaline rush.

Don’t react. Act. Monday night, I was working with a sensei who talked about controlling the pace of a fight by deliberately slowing your strikes. The opponent will follow suit to match your speed, and you can start to speed the other person up or slow them down with your own actions.

If I swear and yell and go ALL-CAPS on someone just because that’s how they wrote to me, then they’re controlling the interaction. The hell with that. If I choose to respond in kind, that’s one thing. But I’ve also had success online by responding in different ways, at which point the other person changes their replies to match mine. Suddenly I’m controlling the interaction and determining how things will go.

It’s hard. When someone punches me, I want to punch back twice as hard. But I think back to another sensei describing an interaction where the other person threw the first punch. The sensei howled, “I think you broke my ribs!” and hobbled away, hamming up his injury for the whole crowd.

He was fine. He knew how to take a punch. He could have broken his opponent into bite-sized snacks. But he didn’t have to. Instead, he took his opponent’s mental balance and ended the fight just like that.

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Confronting is not the same as fighting. Speaking out is a form of confrontation, and I think it’s important. And sometimes, confrontation does lead to fighting. But if that happens, I want it to be my choice, and I want to make that choice for (in my opinion) the right reasons.

If someone is abusive to me or others on my blog, I’ll step in to end that behavior. If a stranger talks crap at or about me on Twitter, I need to recognize that they’re probably not worth my time or energy.

These are all things I’m struggling with, and posting these ideas  doesn’t mean I’ve learned to live them yet.

Thoughts and comments are welcome, as usual.

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Mirrored from Jim C. Hines.

A friend asked me about how I balance writing, blogging, family, and everything else in my schedule. In part, I do this by trying to prepare blog posts over the weekend. But then you get weekends where there’s an ice cream/dodge ball event for my son, then a day-and-a-half karate workshop, and then the joys of pushing our minivan out of a snowy ditch. (Everyone’s fine, and the van is undamaged.)

So instead of the book review or the guest blog post or anything else I had planned, y’all get a few bullet points instead, ’cause that’s all the brain I had left.

• Galactic Suburbia just announced the and winner of the first Galactic Suburbia Award, “for activism and/ or communication that advances the feminist conversation in the field of speculative fiction in 2011.” I’m honored to be among the honorees. (If you’re a regular reader of my blog, you should probably be reading most or all of the folks listed.) Congratulations to winner Nicola Griffith. You can listen to the podcast here.
• Every time I go to a karate workshop, I’m struck again by how much karate and writing have in common. This weekend, we were talking about the need for an outside perspective, someone who can see what we’re doing and help us to refine our techniques, because just practicing in front of a mirror isn’t enough. And this is why writers have editors… (More thoughts on the parallels later. Maybe.)
• Blurbs are hard. I’m struggling to come up with a blurb for Jaime Lee Moyer’s novel Delia’s Shadow when what I really want to do is write a review. (I’ll probably write a review anyway.) Do you think the publisher would just give me a full page or two to talk about the book?

Finally, have some LEGO Quiddich. This set was part of Brickvention in Melbourne. It was built by Jennie Sasson, and the photo is by Shannon Ocean. Click the pic for a larger view, or here for a second shot of the match (with thestrals!)

Mirrored from Jim C. Hines.

So far this week, the release of Goblin Tales  [Amazon | B&N] has pretty much dominated my brain (91 sales and counting), but I did have other news I wanted to share. On Monday, my sensei gave me my promotion form for shodan (first degree black belt).

I’m sorting out my emotions on this one. Excitement, definitely. Some anxiety as well. And there’s certainly a bit of pride in the mix, though I get pounded regularly enough that I don’t think I’m in danger of developing a swollen ego.

It’s been just over three years since I started studying Sanchin-Ryu. From what I’ve seen, that’s faster than average … but I had some martial arts background going in, and I’ve been attending extra classes for much of those three years, as well as working out with a few more experienced (and higher ranking) friends at their place.

My first Sanchin-Ryu post from March of 2008 is here, where I talk about my initial impressions and how I was invited to join my daughter in working out. (She has since chosen to stop attending classes.) I still enjoy this style and the overall atmosphere: supportive and noncompetitive, but also practical and results-oriented.

They say black belt is a beginning. That now you have a foundation, and can start to truly learn and understand the style. It reminds me a bit of selling that first novel, and the realization that after working so hard to reach that point, there’s so much more to do and learn.

Sanchin-Ryu doesn’t have the same kind of formal tests as the Tae Kwon Do classes I took as a kid. Rather, as Master Cataline puts it, every class is part of your test. Your promotion begins the day you first walk in the door.

There will still be a promotion night probably later this year, once I get my paperwork completed and turned in. And I expect to get my butt whooped that night, but it’s very different from the kind of thing Peg Kerr has been describing as she prepares for her black belt test. (Not saying one way is better or worse; just noting the differences. Also, I need to make a Sanchin-Ryu LJ icon!)

I’ve gotten a lot out of the past 3+ years of study. It greatly helps me to manage stress. I enjoy the people and the physical workout. And while I’m not ready to start moonlighting as a superninja, I do feel more confident about my techniques. Even though I know there’s so much left to learn. Or maybe because I recognize that there’s so much to learn … that perspective better highlights how much I’ve learned, too.

It’s been a good journey so far. I’m excited to see what comes next … especially if I get to learn the legendary Boot-to-the-Head technique.

Mirrored from Jim C. Hines.

I’ve talked before about the similarities between writing and martial arts, but the more I study Sanchin-Ryu, the more I appreciate it as a metaphor for writing.  (Or maybe writing is a metaphor for karate, I don’t know.)

One things I struggled with in Sanchin-Ryu is that there’s no blocking.  Oh, you learn pretty quickly to keep your hands up to guard, and there are strikes to intercept an opponent’s attack, not to mention learning to move into your opponent to disrupt their attack.  But no blocks.

Because you’re going to get hit. No matter how long you study blocking, no matter how fast you are.  Bruce Lee, Jet Li, Jackie Chan … they all get hit.  So we focus on acting instead of reacting.  On controlling the confrontation instead of trying to guess and deflect our opponent’s strikes.  On learning to take the hit, minimize the damage, and return that energy.

If you’re going to be a writer, you’re going to get hit.  Some of those hits are going to hurt, as with my very first submission to Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Fantasy Magazine, which came back with a note “You must have had a point to this story … but I have no idea what it was.”  Or learning my French publisher wouldn’t buy the third goblin book because sales had been lousy.

Other hits are easier to shrug off, such as a negative review of The Stepsister Scheme which said “the book goes from happy girl power romp … to a few things that I’m sure could be found in an S&M porno.”

You can’t block every hit.  Some of them are going to knock you on your ass, like the day I learned Baen Books had withdrawn an offer to publish my novels.

Growing up, I remember the kids who would go crazy when hit, flailing about like a cross between Gonzo and the Tasmanian Devil. That happens with writers, too.  It’s not pretty.

You’re going to get hit.  Rejections and bad reviews, not to mention jealous friends or peers, trouble with editors and/or publishers, online trolls, flamewars, and so much more.  And it’s going to hurt.  Part of being a writer is learning to take the hit.

I think the most helpful thing is to regain your stance.  A good hit steals your balance.  Take it back.  Your writing career could span decades.  This is only one review, one rejection, one setback.  In the case of my French publisher, I had to remind myself that other aspects of my career were still going well.  (Happy side note: I now have a new French publisher which has picked up the first two princess books.)

In the case of Marion Zimmer Bradley, I found a way to send that energy right back.  I took her rejection as a challenge to write an even better story, one she would have to buy.  (I sold my first story to her in 1999, four years later.) 

Know which hits require a response, and how to respond.  Random Amazon reviewer?  You have to shrug it off.  Publisher refusing to pay you?  Start with one well-targeted strike from SFWA’s Griefcom.

Keep your focus.  Don’t let an opponent dictate how things are going to go.  One of the reasons I banned an individual from my LiveJournal last week is that I simply don’t have the time or energy for it; I have a book to finish.

And most importantly, remember to breathe.

Other suggestions or advice on how to take a literary hit?  Or how not to?

Mirrored from Jim C. Hines.

When I was a kid learning Tae Kwon Do, I hated sparring.  I don’t like to fight.  Being small for my age didn’t help.  It was my least favorite part of the lessons.

Jump ahead 20 years to the present.  Sanchin-Ryu, the style my daughter and I have been studying, has been a very different experience for me.  Take last night.  We had a session of fighting practice.  I was the lowest ranked, least experienced student in the group.  Among other things, I took a punch to the groin (thankfully, the black belt who threw that punch had very good control), as well as a punch to the back of my fist¹.  That one’s still sore this morning.

I had a blast.  Yes, a part of me is wondering if that’s a sign of deeper psychological problems.  But mostly I think it’s because with this style and group of people, there’s always a clear understanding that everyone wants you to succeed.  It’s not about winning or scoring points; it’s about helping you to see and understand what you did well and what you need to do better.

It reminds me very much of the editorial process.  My editor kicks my butt with every book.  My agent often jumps in as well.  (Much like the me-against-two-black-belts scenario I had last night, actually.  That was fun!)  I usually come away bruised, but it’s a good thing.  They’re not the enemy; they want me to succeed and improve.

And if one of their comments hits a little too hard or in a particularly sensitive spot?  Well, you can bet that next time I’ll be paying attention to my form and technique to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

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Mirrored from Jim C. Hines.